Precis

Bali's natural beauty and rich culture have made it a tourist magnet but since COVID-19, the island is struggling to stay afloat. Locals are questioning their dependence on tourism and the over-development it has unleashed.

Marcello and the lifeguards of Kuta Beach rise bright and early for their morning meeting and surf sprints. But they know it's going to be a quiet day. While the iconic beach normally attracts 50,000 visitors a day from around the world, today the head lifeguard expects only 50 people.

"Nobody makes a life on the beach", says Marcello. "People who sell massage, or merchandise on the beach...I heard they all go back home to their village. It's a very sad situation."

It's a common story across the island, even in its remotest corners. Off Bali's east coast on the small island of Ceningan, Wayan lost his job at a hotel, and had to return to farming seaweed with his family. It's the same story across Ceningan.

"Before we had 100 per cent tourism. Now 80 or 90 percent they are doing seaweed farms," says Wayan who's had to cop a 75 percent pay cut. "We had no choice but to return to nature."

But some Balinese see the crisis as an opportunity. "This is a wake-up call for all of us," says Christia, a young businesswoman. "We realised that we cannot just depend on one industry."

In this visually stunning story, reporter and cameraman Matt Davis travels around Bali and discovers an island in the midst of some serious soul searching.

He meets locals who are questioning the unhinged development that's accompanied the tourist boom and who want to chart a different course for the future.

"Bali tourism industry is based on two things, nature and culture," says rock star Gede Robi, "and we cannot sacrifice them".

Politicians and businesspeople want to fix the congestion, pollution and rubbish problems and encourage a different type of tourism. One that's sustainable and benefits locals more.

"I think it's a good time for reflection this year," says Christia, "Go back to loving our island and make sure that people don't abuse our island as well."

"We hope that when the tourists come back, they are coming with a good energy, they are not littering, with more respect for the local rules," says Marcello. "Come with a good vibe."

Episode teaser.

00:00

MATT DAVIS, Reporter: Bali is one of the world's most popular holiday destinations, but has it become a victim of its own success?

00:14

WAYAN:  Tourism started to explode. More people coming in from outside than there are people living here.

00:20

MATT DAVIS, Reporter: Decades of unhinged tourist development has come at a cost.

00:28

GARY: The island of gods had become the island of trash.

00:32

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Now, mostly closed to the outside world, does Bali have a chance for change, a chance to reset?

00:42

ROBI: Bali tourism industry based on these two things, nature and culture. We cannot sacrifice them!

00:50

Episode Title:
Tomorrow Will Be Better

01:00

Bali airport

01:05

Davis at airport. Super:
Reporter
Matt Davis

01:14

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  I arrive in Bali via a domestic flight from Indonesia's capital, Jakarta.  For almost a year, the international airport has been shut. Tourism has come to a grinding halt.

01:16

Walking through the international airport here, a place I've been through many times in my life is just quite surreal. It's normally bustling with international tourists coming to the island of the gods, but today it's so quiet. I can hear the air-conditioner, that's the only sound."

01:38

COK ACE:  We had anticipated 7 million visitors in 2020.

02:01

Cok Ace. Super:
Cok Ace
Vice Governor, Bali

That's been the projection since 2000. Then came March.

02:07

Closed businesses GVs

Many countries imposed lockdowns. The number of visitors dropped to zero. No flights coming in to Bali at all.

02:17

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Over the past decade, the number of visitors to the island grew rapidly – from 2 to 6 million.  Around 80% of the Balinese economy was generated by tourism.

02:27

COK ACE:  So when tourism stopped, we all really felt the impact.

02:42

Scenery GVs

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Bali has been shut before.  The 2002 Kuta bombings, and the erratic eruptions of volcano Agung hurt the tourism industry, but ultimately it bounced back.  This time no one knows when the pandemic will end.

02:48

Beach, lifeguards

03:13

MARCHELLO: In the beginning we thought it was going to be one month, two months maximum.

03:18

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  It's now been 12 months. For Marchello Aryafara and the lifeguards of Kuta beach, their job has changed dramatically.

MARCHELLO: Fifty people.

03:25

Marchello

Not 50,000 as normally. Fifty people. Maximum 100, including the lifeguards.

03:36

Lifeguards train on beach

Music

03:44

LIFEGUARD: The beaches are dead. There's no activity. The lifeguards still come. If something happens, the lifeguards have to be there.

03:48

The activities of the lifeguards never stop.

04:09

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  This beach is usually crammed with tourists, touts and hawkers. Today Kuta and nearby Seminyak are empty. 

MARCHELLO:  People who sell massage, or merchandise on the beach, I heard they all go back home to their village.

04:20

Marchello

It’s a very sad situation because many friends of mine, I don’t see them around.

04:40

Beach

I hope they're okay, you know. I hope they're still alright.

04:50

Beachside vendors

Music

04:54

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  For the past year, government handouts have helped, but they haven’t gone far enough.  The Balinese are relying on each other to make sure those going without get fed.

05:02

Man distributing food on street

MAN:  I’m giving the food to the man who need the food, and to some homeless people in Bali. I had a tattoo shop, but I lost everything. But I’m happy to be giving all the free food. I am so happy, I am glad for that.  The thing is, we need to be grateful for what we have at the moment. Balinese people always pray, and we believe in the gods.

05:16

Hawker

HAWKER:  Every day I am selling here. And I hope tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow will be better.

05:43

Food vendors

Music

05:51

WOMAN FOOD SELLER: It’s weird. It’s just – no one. It’s like a ghost town. I miss Bali being busy and traffic - I miss traffic!"

06:13

Travel to Sanur

06:27

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  As the tourist centres of south Bali grapple with economic collapse, I want to find out how the Balinese are coping in more remote areas.

06:33

Music

06:41

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  I'm standing on the beach here in Sanur, on the east coast of Bali, and very shortly I will be jumping aboard one of these high-speed boats to cross the Badung Strait to Nusa Lembongan.

06:59

Tourists board ferry

Last year, there were more than 20 boat companies operating off this beach, sending thousands of tourists back and forth to the islands every week.

07:13

Davis to camera on beach

But now there are only two boats and two trips a day.

07:21

Fast boat to Nusa Lembongan

Music

07:25

Nusa Lembongan GVs

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  For decades, this cluster of islands off the east coast of Bali remained sleepy backwaters with little tourist development.

07:34

Music

07:41

Disembarkation from fast boat

TROY: Nusa Lembongan remained, for a long time, a bit of a hidden secret. Over the last five years that sort of changed.

07:54

Troy looks out to sea

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Hotelier Troy Sinclair has spent the past 18 years here; he's seen tourism explode.

08:00

Troy interview

TROY: We're talking a massive change in volume and in the numbers coming in.

08:08

Villages carry offerings to temple

Music

08:13

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Here on Nusa Lembongan, the rapid growth brought jobs. Most of the locals found work in tourism.  Almost everyone here has been impacted by the shutdown.

08:22

Man on street

MAN:  No money!

08:44

Troy on boat

08:51

TROY:  That's all villas and bungalows all along the hill there. All pretty much empty.

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  With no money coming in, staff have been let go and maintenance is on hold.

08:56

Music

09:07

Sunken pontoon/Troy on boat

TROY: This one went down the other day. Pontoons are day trip businesses. They moor up against these big pontoons, and they then go into the island for tours to the Instagram shots.

09:13

This pontoon under normal circumstances would have guys on it every day, checking it, diving on it, looking at it. Obviously, in these conditions they simply don't. And a small leak can lead to this very quickly. I’ve been here a long time, my staff are essentially family. Instead of letting things fall away or shutting up shop, how do we ensure that they have jobs to come back to?

09:24

Ceningan GVs

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  A short motorbike trip from Lembongan is the island of Ceningan.

09:58

Bridge to Ceningan

Every day, people crossed this bridge to earn a living in Lembongan’s tourist trade.

10:03

WAYAN: Local people call this bridge "Love Bridge", because it brings together Lembongan and Ceningan. Like love, where it unites two people into one

10:11

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  For generations, the channel was used by local families to farm seaweed. 

10:26

Seaweed farm/Beach development

But with the arrival of tourism, this industry died off – the farms made way for day clubs, and selfie swings.

10:31

Wayan working seaweed farm

The seaweed farms have returned, because most on the island are now out of work.

10:47

WAYAN:  My name is Wayan. I come from Ceningan Island. From 1984, something like that, my family have worked at the seaweed farms. 

10:57

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  At low tide, Wayan and his parents harvest seaweed. Working by day, or by night, it’s tough work.

11:10

WAYAN:  Seaweed is very good for your health, but not so healthy for those harvesting it.

11:29

WAYAN'S DAD:  Seaweed no good.

WAYAN: My parents doesn’t want me to seaweed farm. Because it’s very, very hard.

11:35

We have no choice, so we have to go back to nature.

11:44

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  The seaweed is dried before being sent to Java for processing. There, it’s turned into beauty products, sushi and medicinal extracts.

11:51

Wayan carries baskets of seaweed

Wayan left the island to study tourism. That was the golden ticket for many of his generation. As mass tourism arrived here, Wayan returned in the hopes of building a better life for his young family.

12:15

Wayan walks to villa

WAYAN: Tourism started to explode. More people coming in from outside than the people living here

12:35

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Before the pandemic, Wayan and his wife invested their life savings to build a bungalow for tourists.

12:41

WAYAN: I tried to build my own business, even I have loaned money from the bank.

12:48

Wayan sits at villa

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  The bungalow has only seen a few guests.

12:54

WAYAN:  This pandemic is still going on. So this is the worst thing that's happened. Especially when I had to borrow money from the bank, and then for me now, it’s very hard to return this one back.

13:00

Wayan on motorbike to home

MATT DAVIS, Reporter: When Wayan worked at a high end resort he earned 800 Australian dollars a month. Now, seaweed farming brings in less than three hundred, and his young family, has grown.

13:18

Wayan's wife and daughter

WAYAN:  This is my little house, here with my family. My youngest daughter, three months. My wife.  When I arrive at my home after getting my seaweed, my kids are smiling.  Your tiredness is gone. So, that’s more important.

13:32

WAYAN'S WIFE:  We still survive here, because of the seaweed.

14:02

Music

14:06

Wayan's wife cooks

WAYAN: We learnt that in the future we should not glorify only one sector of work.

14:16

Wife bathes baby

14:31

If things return to normal, we must be able to balance tourism with the natural way of life here.

14:37

Bridge to Ceningan/ Robi's band performs

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Change is on everyone's mind. Back on the mainland, generations of Balinese are coming together to plan a different future for the island.

14:49

Christia in audience

CHRISTIA:  This is a wake-up call for all of us. So that we realised that we cannot just depend on one industry, and we have to develop all the other industries that actually have great potential.

15:11

Christia at Kebon Vintage

Music

15:23

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Christia Dharmawan runs events at her family's venue, Kebon Vintage. It's become the place for many of these big conversations.

15:26

CHRISTIA:  I think it's a good time for reflection this year, for sure. Going back to loving our island and make sure that people don't abuse our island as well.

15:35

Dancers at event

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  For years, locals have been unhappy with the negative impacts of mass tourism.

COK ACE: In this post pandemic era, certainly there will be some changes in the tourism industry.

15:46

Cok Ace. Super:
Cok Ace
Vice Governor, Bali

Tourism has to bring benefit to Balinese society. This is the time for us to think about this.

16:01

Robi performs

ROBI [sings]: When things get faster, Bali dares to stop and reset…

16:12

Rice padis

Music

16:26

PAK GUS AGUNG: The infrastructure is a problem here in Bali.

16:41

Pak Gus Agung interview

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  It’s clear to Pak Gus Agung, the head of Bali's tourism board, what needs to be done.

16:43

PAK GUS AGUNG: We need schools. 65% of Balinese people haven’t graduated junior high school. There's not enough water.  There's not enough electricity. There's not enough roads. Traffic and rubbish, the number one problem in Bali.

16:49

Music

17:06

PAK GUS AGUNG: Bali has already had tourism for more than a 100 years.  All the money comes but 70% goes out from Bali. Because the business is not operated by Balinese people.  That way of thinking has to change.

17:09

Rubbish on beaches

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Bali’s rubbish problem had begun to tarnish its picture perfect reputation, long before the pandemic. The island lacks a centralised waste system – there's nowhere for this to go.

17:35

In car with Gary Bencheghib

GARY:  The island of gods had become the island of trash.

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  That’s something Bali-raised Gary Bencheghib is trying to change with his organisation Sungai Watch.

17:52

Gary interview

GARY:  What very little people realise is that all of this plastics that literally fills up the brink of Kuta beach comes from somewhere.

18:06

Rubbish in rivers

And it comes from the rivers.  Rivers are essentially the toilets of Indonesia. They're on the backs of hotels, villas. With the lack of waste management we have on the island, our rivers in Bali have  turned into garbage dumps.

18:16

Davis walks with Gary

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  The COVID shutdown provided an unexpected opportunity.

18:37

GARY: There was a sense of we wanted to really do something. And so that's really where we started our weekly clean-ups around the same time.

18:44

Gary interview

Progressively we went from 20, 30 and now we're all the way up to 150, 200 people.

18:54

Workers cleaning up rivers

Music

18:58

GARY:  Because of COVID people have more time. There's this community out there that wants to clean and press the reset button on Bali before we open up to international tourism.

19:08

Music

19:17

Davis at river clean-up to camera

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  So here we are, standing waist to knee depth in the rivers. The Badung district has got all these working here. They've all lost their jobs in the COVID pandemic. They used to work in tourism. Now they're out here every day, attacking these rivers with sickles, with chainsaws, with whatever they've got. It's a war on plastic. There's a long way to go.

19:30

River clean-up

19:50

GEDE:  My name is Gede and before I worked as a driver. But right now, because of the pandemic we have no job anymore in tourism and now we are going to the river, to clean the river. Hopefully soon, the tourism is coming again to Bali and we clean already!

19:58

Vox pops at river

MAN: The people in the village, the locals, we join to clean the river, the beach, the land and the rice field. Thank you.

20:15

WOMAN:  I have a rice field back in my home town and my father he has a problem with plastic every single day. So that's why I needed to find a community who solved this kind of problem.

20:31

River GVs

Music

20:42

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Rivers crisscross the island, flowing through villages, farms and rice fields.

20:46

Men working rice fields

They sustain local communities, and the tourism industry. But the rivers are under pressure:  Tourists per capita generate three and a half times more waste than locals.

20:51

Sungai Watch members sort rubbish

GARY: We're bringing two tonnes of trash every day and our research station to sort. There's a sorting table here to sort plastics into 15 different types of categories. Bring it to recycling.

21:04

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Of the 300 tonnes of plastic collected so far only a third can be recycled.

21:21

GARY: These guys unfortunately can't be recycled. This is a one-time use and it has a lifetime behind it, you know, it lives longer than our grandkids' kids' kids' kids'… What we're trying to leverage is the brands that are responsible for the plastic packaging.

21:27

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Through their comprehensive documentation, Sungai Watch hopes to hold the manufacturers accountable.

GARY:  Sungai Watch, in many ways, is more of a data river clean up organisation. So really giving that transparency as to what we're finding in the rivers online, for everybody to see, so they can engage.

21:45

ROBI:  I believe every generation has their own revolution. Our topic now is about the environmental issue.

22:07

Robi in studio

22:16

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Gede Robi is a musician and an educator.

22:19

Robi's band performs

Music

22:22

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  His band Navicula are rock and roll royalty. For two decades they’ve brought politics to the young people of Bali through their music.

22:25

ROBI: I love rock and roll so much because at a concert we can collect a concentration of audience in one place.

22:35

Robi interview

Even the religion is transferred by shadow puppets and theatre. So what's the difference with rock and roll?

22:47

Robi in studio

Today, Robi is putting the final touches on his film entitled Pulau Plastic – translated, means Plastic Island.

22:55

Robi interview

ROBI:  In Indonesia alone, more than 93 million plastic straws are used every day. More than 500 million plastic bags, single use plastic bags, is used every day.

23:07

Robi in studio

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Produced with local NGO Kopernik, the film is a shift for Robi from years of frontline activism. He wants this documentary to put pressure on decision makers.

23:18

ROBI:  In Bali, the tourism industry and the waste created by this industry has also become a problem. More people come, then more waste… It's really logical, right? What is important for us is prevention.

23:32

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Robi believes that the answers to the island's problems can be found in its traditions.

23:50

ROBI: In Bali, there are some traditional rules, to make a balance between economic prosperity and natural preservation.

23:58

Women carry temple offerings

But we're a long way lost. More money, more money, is betraying this concept.

24:09

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  Will Bali return to the way it was after this pandemic ends?

24:19

Robi interview/Funeral pyre

ROBI:  This is the big lesson for us to shifting our priority. Economy and ecology are not two separate things. We understand that we are live from the nature. We can’t damage nature. Specifically in Bali, the concept is nature and culture tourism. That's our asset. That's what we sell. We cannot shit where we eat. Right?

24:22

Music

24:50

Plane landing/Airport

24:55

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  A year on from the start of COVID, Bali is preparing to re-open to visitors.  Tourism will return to the island of the gods and bring with it much needed money. What type of tourism do you want?

COK ACE: We want everyone to be peaceful in Bali.

25:00

Cok Ace

We don’t want them to ruin our environment.

25:16

Rice field

PAK AGUNG: This is the time for Bali to do. Balinese people look at themselves, yeah? So we will learn. I think the government learns, the industry learns

25:20

Pak Agung

and the people also learn.

25:36

Workers in rice fields

Music

25:38

Taksu (Balinese spirit) is our blood. You cannot describe it, because it’s a process. Balinese people, since they are in the mum pregnant, it’s already started.

25:46

Pak Agung

It’s not religion. It’s Bali.

26:02

Music

26:06

Lifeguards on beach

MATT DAVIS, Reporter:  The Kuta lifeguards are winding down for the day. No one knows exactly when these beaches will be full again, but Marchello and his crew will be waiting.

MARCHELLO: When the tourists are coming, we hope they’re not littering; the beach has been very clean. I hope you guys still come to Bali. We are here for you.

26:12

Marcello

You can bring good energy, we can give our energy for you guys.

26:36

Surfer in wave/Children on  beach

Music

26:44

Credits [see below]

27:22

Outpoint

27:49